1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an image managing apparatus, an image managing method, and an image managing program, which are suitable for managing a plurality of images.
2. Description of the Related Art
Digital cameras, scanners, and so on have been widely used and everyone may easily acquire digital images. As a result, fens of thousands or more of photographs (images) may be stored in a hard disk of a personal computer (hereinafter, referred to as “PC”) or the like. Furthermore, if a digital camera is used, images can be taken casually, so that many images of the same scene may be captured in quest of a better shot. Images taken in this way are large in number, so that it will take time and be inconvenient to see them later. For example, it takes about 20 minutes to see 1,000 pictures even if making a glance at each picture every one second. Thus, it is hard, to look through the whole in this way and it is inconvenient for the user to organise and assort them.
Therefore, computers, such as PCs, have been used to organize images by any technique as described below. A structure that is called a folder or a directory in a file system employed in a general computer is convenient to sort and store pictures (images) by date, place, and occasion (first technique). The user can make hierarchically-organized directories and folders, so that images can be easily subdivided by scenes or the like of every episode or event at different times of a day.
Furthermore, the following method has also been carried out in the art. That is, if the user intends to “see or send to someone a picture (image) selected from each scene”, a directory or a folder for that purpose is made and the selected images are then copied therein. Subsequently, the directory or the folder is recorded on a recording medium and then sent to a person. Alternatively, an image file, which is the one the user wishes to show the person, may be attached to an e-mail and sent to the person. Alternatively, a shortcut indicating a link to the image may foe described on the message body of the e-mail or on a predetermined WWW page (second technique).
As another method, which becomes widely used, a tag that represents an event or a subject may be attached to an image and the information described on such a tag may be then used as a key for searching the image of interest by making a short list of images. Thus, the image of interest can be easily accessed (third technique).
Furthermore, a study of analyzing an image to recognize a person on the image and then automatically providing the image with a tag has been carried out in the art. For example, an image-space displaying method has been proposed. In this method, comparable images are collected and placed in groups and one image is then extracted and displayed from each group (see, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2003-2030510) (fourth technique).